Golden Gate Bridge - seeing the other side of it

Michelle Chahine

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, July 24, 2011

I was ready to get my Golden Gate Bridge postcard. This would be a great coup, added to a checklist of global monuments that includes the Empire State Building in New York, the Great Pyramids in Egypt and the Colosseum in Rome.

The first thing I'd do in each place was pose in front of the well-known landmark and take that perfect photograph for my collection, replicated by every tourist before and after me.

It was, of course, the first thing I wanted to do when I got to San Francisco for the summer. My boyfriend and I arrived at Fisherman's Wharf in the early afternoon on a beautiful, bright Saturday ready to insert ourselves into one of the most famous images in the world: the red bridge against a clear blue sky and dark blue ocean.

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The way to experience it properly, apparently, was by bike. There's even a popular T-shirt you can buy afterward, with "I Biked the Bridge" written across. So, to earn our photo and our shirt, we rented bicycles and headed from the port to the bridge. That's when an ominous cloud rolled in. For whatever reason, we decided to keep going. We were on the bridge when it started to drizzle.

At first, it was exhilarating. I had seen the landmark many times in photographs, on TV, in movies and from a distance across the bay, but it didn't compare to seeing it up close - each wire in the cords, each groove in the metal, each rivet. I was in awe of man's strength, the engineering wonder.

As soon as we got to the end, it began to pour. We got off our bikes, hurriedly carried them down a path (and, somehow, down a long, slippery flight of stairs), and hid underneath the surface of the Golden Gate Bridge, on one of its railings.

Sheltered from the rainfall, this was the only place we managed to take a picture, an unexpected postcard with the monument's underside. While disappointed to have missed the perfect postcard moment, I was intrigued by the idea that I was among a small minority of people with a photo from this lesser-known vantage point, a novel way to experience a well-traveled bridge.

Eventually, we realized we would have to ride back to San Francisco in the downpour. We saw several bikers on the bridge (albeit in ponchos), so it was clearly safe.

On the return trip, I wasn't so impressed by the famous bridge or man's might anymore. I was soaked to the bone, my hands numb from the cold, getting slapped in the face by what felt like needles. One gust of wind could throw me and my bicycle into the water 245 feet below. Weren't people just plain stupid braving the outdoors, traveling and looking for adventure? It took all my strength to keep pedaling, to not just stop the bike, curl up on the ground and refuse to move.

Somewhere in my self-loathing stream of consciousness, we finally did make it across to the other side. To my surprise, while I shivered and spluttered and expected a consoling hug, my boyfriend greeted me with a fist bump and a giant smile.

"We did it! That was awesome!" he shouted into the storm. "Out-of-body experience ..."

"More like out of mind," I muttered.

I continued to shudder violently from the cold on our descent to the shoreline through the Presidio. In front of me, my boyfriend drummed on his chest À la Tarzan, proudly saying with a little growl, "I feel like I can go fight an alligator now. ... I've never done anything in the rain, usually just stay home."

It struck me what I missed out on while waiting indoors for perfect weather - and that postcard views are overrated. The picture I did get that day made for a much better story, and in the future will likely bring back more memories than those from New York, Cairo and Rome.

How many people had biked across the bridge and taken that same photo with the familiar vista? And how many had biked it, like we had, in a first-rate thunderstorm? There really should be a special T-shirt for that.

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